Two weeks in Mexico, you think you've seen it all, gringo

N 44 10.796 E 103 41.449 - 7 October - Bayanzag ger

Ok, should be just about caught up with uploading pictures. The rest of Estonia and Russia here and then into Mongolia here. But we are off for 4 more days in the country today, this time closer to UB and not so much driving, so I might not finish all of them. Our last few days in Mongolia and then we are off to Beijing on the train.

But where was I then? Erdenedalai, I guess, after our first night sleeping on the floor of somebody's house. The morning was pretty cold and it was a icy misty morning out. We hadn't seen the village yet and we still couldn't really see it when we went outside (toilet, brushing teeth, packing the van, etc), just a sort of dusty town covered in a nice mist.

Breakfast on the whole trip was pretty consistent, sliced bread (ok, one morning we had fried bread instead) and jam and some sort of Nutella type thing (usually Gold M but there was another one one day), and tea. C and I had also brought along some oats (precious, expensive from the State Department store, imported from Germany) for porridge. Ok, oats soaked in hot water, vaguely porridge but a really nice addition to the bread. Also, it became even more critically important, as the trip went on and the food was pretty much meat (just called meat but was generally something that was once on a sheep) and starchy or not very green things (potatoes, rice, carrots, cabbage), the fiber was kind of important to, umm, help push things through the system.

We had read there was a monastery in town, built in honor of one of the Dali Lamas coming to visit and that it was somewhat impressive, Zola can we go see that? She didn't know where it was but would ask. I guess that brings up another problem with the trip, or maybe trips of this type, the classic routes. When we discussed the trip originally, the guy said, ok, you will go here and there and blah blah, but if you want to change anything, just discuss it with your guide and she can make it happen. The problem is that they mostly just know that route and it doesn't turn out to be very flexible at all. We would be reading the travel guide and see things that were close that seemed nice, oh, we passed that yesterday, or we actually have to get to this other place so there isn't time. And a lot of it, she just didn't really know since it wasn't the normal route. Sigh. But it was still good. There is no way we could have seen everything in Mongolia, there would always be things we missed, so it was good to enjoy the things we did see.

But yeah, the monastery, it was just a short walk across the village, of course it was closed. Zola asked something of the guard outside, but I guess it was still closed. It was pretty from the outside though. Zola gave us a short rundown on Buddism, what the various symbols and colors mean. It does seem to be a sort of confusing religion to get an immediate grasp on. Maybe that's been Christianity's strength, it has a pretty immediate kind of risks and benefits and the basic structure of gods and various religious things seem pretty barebones. Or maybe that's from coming from a culture that is filled with the religion and icons and the rest of that. It took much of the next week to get a really basic understanding of it all, why the gods are blue or red, or have skulls hanging off them, and things like that. The big thing to learn was that all of them, even the blue ones, used to be human until they reached enlightenment and became gods. I really liked the service we saw when we were in UB, chanting and singing and playing different sorts of percussion instruments. There seems to be a cool chaos, lots of people in the temple all doing their own thing but also kind of mixing it all up with everybody else, much more personal than just sitting there focusing on one central person preaching to you and having the church built so that your eye is directed to sort of a central point. The monasteries have all sorts of things, scattered all over, things to walk around, prayer wheels to spin, it does seem much more personal and self directed in that way.

So, back in the truck, rough roads, brown dry scenery rushing by (just going to cut and paste that into a lot of this diary), and eventually end up in Mandalgovi at lunch time. The restaurant gets frozen dumplings out of the freezer and it will be 20 minutes, you all can go wandering around if you want (free time). It is funny, on so much of our journey so far, I have been aware of being foreign, and sometimes of being a tourist, but until now, I haven't really felt so much on display. In Sweden or Norway or even Russia, I'm sure I stood out a little bit but I still felt like I could kind of blend in a bit, not be so obviously traveling and from so far away. Here, everybody looks at you, kids tap you and say hi or one,two,three,four, or just giggle and stare. It is funny having things switched on you. I can go to some other country, stand back and look and maybe see things as if they were on display for me, but here, we also become something to be stared and gawked at. A group of four young girls (probably 8-10 yrs) spots us and starts laying out a plastic sheet on the ground, putting various trinkets on it and invites us into their impromptu souvenir shop. Gotta give it to them, they are good, a few stuffed wool camels end up getting bought.

Lunch, dumplings with fatty bits of meat in them. Kind of taste good and also really don't taste good at all, especially the fatty bits. We try some of the milk tea too, which I don't mind so much, but everybody else pretty much hates it. We don't really get it again, which is fine, I mostly want tea and this stuff tastes more like porridge without the oats and a bit of tea in it. Not a horrible taste in itself but not tea.

iPods come out and there is a bit of music. I don't understand why the Red Hot Chili Peppers are the first thing anybody thinks of as road music. I have flashbacks to CRRU and Gardenstown and the endless Chili Peppers there too.

Running out of time to write, I better go and see a few things before we leave UB again. Ended up that night in a nice valley, near a lake, in a ger with lots of camels around. We take a 1 hour camel walk at sunset, up a hill, looking over the camp and the valley near Bayanzag. Quite nice and pretty. Camels, I should write more about them later, what a way to get around the desert though. We then roast in the ger with a hot fire and have dinner and then freeze later that night when the stove goes out and it dips down to 0 C. But more of that in the next chapter.